The trap-door might have been a window looking into a tunnel.
On each side of this horrible window, almost pushed before it by the pressure of one upon the other, stood Pine, Vickers, and the guard.

In front of the little group lay the corpse of the miserable boy whom Sarah Purfoy had led to ruin; and forced close upon, yet shrinking back from the trampled and bloody mass, crouched in mingled terror and rage, the twenty mutineers.

Behind the mutineers, withdrawn from the patch of light thrown by the open hatchway, the mouth of the howitzer threatened destruction; and behind the howitzer, backed up by an array of brown musket barrels, suddenly glowed the tiny fire of the burning match in the hand of Vickers's trusty servant.
The entrapped men looked up the hatchway, but the guard had already closed in upon it, and some of the ship's crew--with that carelessness of danger characteristic of sailors--were peering down upon them.

Escape was hopeless.
"One minute!" cried Vickers, confident that one second would be enough--"one minute to go quietly, or--" "Surrender, mates, for God's sake!" shrieked some unknown wretch from out of the darkness of the prison.

"Do you want to be the death of us ?" Jemmy Vetch, feeling, by that curious sympathy which nervous natures possess, that his comrades wished him to act as spokesman, raised his shrill tones.